Alfredo Gutierrez on what comes after the immigration march

Alfredo Gutierrez has been around long enough to know that public demonstrations, no matter how large or how emotional, change nothing.

"A march is wonderful for morale," he told me. "It's a tool for mobilizing a community, for energizing people, but ultimately the hard work is what we do all summer long. We will be focusing on voter registration. That is the real struggle and the real work. I look at this as our 'freedom summer.' We are asking volunteers from all over the country to come here and help with registration. A march makes noise and lets people know that we are out there. But change is accomplished by a quiet determination."

Gutierrez was one of the prime movers behind Saturday's demonstration against Senate Bill 1070. He also is one of the organizers of a national boycott over Arizona's new law.

He is known these days mostly as a community activist, radio host and the founder of lafrontera times.com.

For years before that, however, Gutierrez was a Democratic state senator, operating at a time when those on opposite sides of the aisle didn't view the opposition as evil, only wrong. He's also been a successful lobbyist.

Gutierrez is in his mid-60s and grew up in Miami, Ariz., at a time when civil rights and migrant rights were still dreams.

"This bill, 1070, is the result of a convergence of factors, good and bad," he said. "The Obama administration walked away from reform, and there was a resurgence of young people getting involved in the struggle to improve things."

For that reason, Gutierrez considers SB 1070 an opportunity as much as a setback.

"I believe that this law has invigorated the Hispanic community like nothing I have seen in my lifetime, and I have lived a long time," he said. "What (state Sen.) Russell Pearce has done with this bill is to put everyone with brown skin in the same boat - legal, illegal, first generation, fourth generation. It paints everyone with the same brush. It has united the community."

The problem for Gutierrez is translating that enthusiasm into action, something he witnessed firsthand after a stint in the military when he enrolled at Arizona State University.

"I started registering voters in 1968," he said. "Always with the promise and the expectation that our time was coming. I never expected it to take this long."

The reason he supports a boycott is to try to keep SB 1070 from spreading to other states and to prevent the momentum generated by the law from spurring more legislation in Arizona.

"In the long run, this will blow up in Pearce's face," Gutierrez said. "With the national focus on our state and the damage to our reputation - some fair and some not - as the Mississippi of this century, that can't be good for business."

At the same time he's realistic enough to know that more legislation is coming, perhaps in the form of a bill that would deny birth certificates to children born in Arizona to non-citizens.

Pearce has talked of proposing such legislation and he's feeling emboldened by public-opinion polls showing strong support for SB 1070.

Those polls also are turning politicians who once spoke in conciliatory terms into hard-liners. One of them is Sen. John McCain, R-Ariz., whom Gutierrez met decades ago when McCain first ran for Congress.

"What McCain's doing now, the pandering to get re-elected, just makes me sad," he said.

Still, as someone who has gone from the ultimate political insider to the ultimate political outsider, Gutierrez is optimistic.

"If we do the hard work, the voter registration, the voting, this trend will be reversed," he told me. "I believe that. I have to believe that."